New Website is Online

With the complete rewrite of the Portable-Fun website, I accidentally made an amazing discovery. I was rebuilding and testing it on a standard domain. Once I was ready to make the site live, and made the change, I needed to enable SSL secure checkout. That is when I bumped into all kinds of problems, and I realized what has been happening to all my "lost" sales!

In short, an updated Firefox browser would run fine from start to end, so i never noticed a problem. However, everyone using ANY version Microsoft's Internet Explorer, or any other odd browser like Opera, Safari or Marathon was having all kinds of problems.

For example, depending on the browser and version, people would fill out all their information (Name, address, etc) only to later get an SSL warning about how they should not proceed! I noticed this because the new checkout process is different, so the warning showed up right away.

Other people had another problem with cookies. It would have the item in the cart right up to the switch over to SSL, and then the cart would magically be emptied! Since the new chat software lets me watch what people are doing, I have seen this time and again, but had no idea that the website, or SSL, was to blame.

Now, I don't know if this, and the whole website redesign, is going to really improve the overall sales. But, i do feel so much better, in knowing why I was actually loosing so many customers, and was able to fix the problem.